People

March 20, 2007

The five-year-old lay Catholic reform group Voice of the Faithful awarded retired Detroit auxiliary Bishop ThomasGumbleton its “Priest of Integrity” honor February 24 in Washington. Gumbleton was honored for his advocacy on behalf of victims of clergy sexual abuse and for promoting greater lay involvement in the church. The 77-year-old bishop has been criticized for meeting with liberal groups, however, and was removed from his Detroit parish in December. The bishop is the fourth recipient of Voice of the Faithful’s award, said spokesperson John Moynihan. “In each of these cases [the recipient] was someone who was speaking out against the hierarchy and being punished for it.” Gumbleton stunned the church in January 2006 when he said he had been abused by a priest when he was a teenager.

After a quarter-century leading Catholics for a Free Choice—25 years of blistering ads, controversial speeches and quixotic campaigns to upset the Vatican—FrancesKissling, 62, retired at the end of last month. She’ll still be writing and possibly teaching, but she’s done brawling with the Catholic Church. “I definitely don’t want to spend as much time in active resistance against the institution. It gets boring. It gets tiring. It’s the same brick wall,” Kissling said. “I think my side is losing.”

PaulS.Minear, a New Testament scholar who taught at Andover Newton Theological School and Yale Divinity School, died at his home in Guilford, Connecticut, on February 22, only five days after he celebrated his 101st birthday. Early in his career, Minear became active in ecumenical affairs, notably on the World Council of Churches’ faith and order commission. A member of the committee that produced the NRSV Bible, Minear retired from Yale Divinity in 1971 but continued to publish books and articles. Shortly before his death, he learned that an article he had written when he was 100 had been accepted for publication in Horizons in Biblical Theology.